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Every so often, the staff where I work get together separately and bake for the benefit of the staff where I work. One of our group is a vegan by choice, and another can't digest protein (for medical reasons). Like a good Jewish mother, I felt the need to make a cake that 1) both could eat and 2) so would everyone else. A parve cake wouldn't be enough. It would have to be egg-less as well.

So I surfed the intertubes, and came across dairy-free egg-free chocolate cake recipes. I actually found several. They were all pretty similar, with slight variations of ingredients amounts, and all had very unglamorous names such as Wacky, Crazy or Depression Cake. But all the reviews raved about them. And the best part: stir and bake in the same pan! No mixer needed! Woo-hoo! Sign me up, George!

My final assignment for one of my library classes required me to create a web site. Of course, it was a recipe site. The site was yanked along with my account pretty much the day after I graduated, but I saved the recipes. During the next week or so I will post them here.

The younger son of my neighbor across the street was my middle child's best friend, so my kid lived over there during most of his non-school waking hours. One day he came home for a rare meal here, and raved about his bff's mom's brisket recipe. She was nice enough to give me a copy of it.

It's supposed to be her great-great grandmother's recipe, but the use of soy sauce and ground ginger makes me think that it didn't exactly come with her on the boat over from Eastern Europe. It's a pretty good recipe, even if when I make it, it doesn't taste like her's, according to middle child. The most likely reason is that she uses different brands. Who knows?

I found this article, which tickles my geeky side, as well as my chocolate side (and no, I'm not going to tell you which is which). It shows how you can use leftover chocolate candy in ways other than to expand your hips:

Growing up, one of my favorite things to get at the local candy store was an egg cream. No egg, no cream. Just 3 ingredients: milk, seltzer and chocolate syrup. But somehow I could never get the proportions just right. Hmmm ... needs more milk ... needs more syrup ... needs more seltzer ... repeat until you make a gallon.

So I married a professional egg cream maker. No, actually I married him because of his accounting skills. You see, my only C while going for my MBA was in accounting and he was in school to be a CPA. ;) But I digress ...

Fast forward 25 years to find me in the class "Social Software in the Library," one of a bunch of courses to get my library degree (no, I refuse to veer off to explain that one, maybe in a later post). We had an assignment to make a video on any how-to we wanted, then post it on YouTube. Luckily, quality of the video didn't count, just as long as it had audio that almost synchs to the vidoe. Hubby, who as a result of working a…

So now it's the evening before darling son has to bring the pot stickers to school. Computer whiz that he is, he has already emailed his PowerPoint presentation to the teacher. "But darling son," I ask, "you haven't included the fry/steam part of the pot sticker making." "That's OK," he assured me. "I added at the end that you then put them in the oven to bake." Ooo-kaaay. Since the teacher is from mainland China, there's a slight chance that she might know that the last part does not quite ring true. Anyway, to finish cooking them up the correct way, bring out your frying implement. As you can see here, I used my dutch oven, since it's wider than my puny frying pan, and I didn't want to spend the entire night finishing these babies. Especially when House is coming on in a half hour. Add a couple tablespoons of oil, just enough to cover the bottom, and turn up the flame to medium-high. When the oi…

Despite the option of saving as a draft, I somehow managed to lose this post anyway. I'm famous for that so expect more posts "disappearing." But in the interest of someone out there who is interested in what this post was supposed to say, I'll attempt a recreation. Anyway, last week darling son came home from school and announced that he had volunteered me to make pot stickers for his Chinese class (wasn't that nice of him?). You see, a long time ago when I had more free time because Facebook wasn't invented yet, read a recipe for pot stickers, a not-so-kosher recipe by Steamykitchen, adjusted the ingredients then made a pile of pot stickers. And darling son remembered. So we made pot stickers. They are not really hard to make kosher. As you can see on the bottom right of the photo, this brand of wrappers has a hechsher (kosher certification), so you will have to find a different excuse not to make them. You probably already have …

I asked darling son what he would like for me to make for Valentine's Day. As usual, he shrugged and said, whatever. I didn't even ask daHubby because he would just say make whatever I like, so the score is thus: 2 for whatever.

Why then should I then wreck the kitchen for anything fancy? So brownies to the rescue! Rather than fall back on my standard brownie recipe, Hershey's triple chocolate brownie pie (which I clipped from a 1991 Hershey's ad and is not, unfortunately on the current Hershey's web site but you can find a copy using The Google), I thought I would try LunaCafe's Silky Fudgy Brownie recipe.

The LunaCafe recipe is more complicated, and requires a stand mixer and a saucepot (unlike ol' faithful which only needs a bowl, whisk and microwave to melt the butter). However, LC calls for 4 egg whites instead of 2 whole eggs, so I thought I'd give it a go.

The recipe says bake for "around 40 minutes." Apparently 25 is the new 40, …